Yesterday evening one of Echo 8’s players, Phox tweeted out a twitlonger stating that his mental health has been really bad, and that he will be taking a break from professional VALORANT to focus on his studies. For all that would like to read his statement, here it is:
After a few minutes, Matt Paoletti, a Riot employee which works on Riot’s anti-cheat tweeted the following:
Immediately after Matt’s tweet stating that Phox was cheating, W3ak, Phox’s teammate released a statement saying the following:
Not gonna try to prolong this anymore. None of our teammates knew we were cheating. I got a message from phox this morning saying he got banned, so I checked if I was too. I have now logged in to being banned, thought I could play it off.
W3ak
Phox and W3ak are the first professional players to get caught cheating after spending numerous hours playing VALORANT. What’s more concerning is that Riot’s anti-cheat is not working well enough. If people like Phox and W3ak can keep cheating their way to win tournaments and events with huge prize pools, who’s going to stop them? The anti-cheat must improve, and Riot Games have to act now, before there are more cases like these.
